The Unbearable Lightness of Adulthood
At certain crossroads of our lives we take on more challenges than we actually can handle.
When I say challenge I don’t mean “hustling”. I am not talking about feeling overwhelmed because you answer 100s of emails everyday, do overtime and then have a freelance gig which additionally puts pressure on you. Just, why do you do that anyways? You are putting more pressure on anybody else too, so stop!
I mean things that don’t look challenging at first sight but stretch us more than we expect in the end.
Like moving to an entire new country, while at the same time starting a new career or a study program and learning a new language or maybe even two.
To me, all of these sounded easy peasy. I learn languages as a hobby anyways, how different can it be when learning these languages are crucial for my day to day survival? I was naive to think that.
When you are under so much pressure and receive too few joy or reward from completing very hard tasks one after another, it doesn’t even make you feel like you have accomplished something.
Yes, the imposter syndrome.
To believe that, you are a fraud and you have nothing valuable to say. To wait for your own failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy and ironically feel a little happy about it because for once you were right about something.
Why does it happen to the best of us?
I am not an expert on psychology or sociology or anything really. So I am not going to delve into the science or whatever evolutionary explanation there might be behind it. Or actually why not, let’s try:
Probably it goes something like this. Once upon a time, as we all lived in caves and were hunters and gatherers, there were super smart people who were not necessarily very into fighting for their food, or sticking with their group at all costs just to have an edge over rivals and predators. They were often eaten by the predators but since they are smart, a handful of them managed the survival of their genes until today. They were never really liked in their groups since they could endanger the very basic tenets that made a group with their obnoxious comments or not acceptance of the group rules. So they learned to not like themselves while not giving up on the quest to find the “truth”.
How do you like my attempt at evolutionary psychology?
People love evolutionary explanations these days. It’s like a handbook. Once you know the two most important concepts; survival and reproduction, you can pretty much “explain”everything in a reductionist manner. It’s fun, try it.
Now that we know why imposter syndrome exists from an evolutionary perspective — we can continue feeling like sh*t.
Why is it that we lose our sense of why we have started something in the first place? Has this ever happened to you?
Like you question everything. EVERYTHING. You are unhappy and you try to trace it back to the cause of it. Maybe it was the job you took. Maybe it was moving to a new place.
Maybe it was your pet? No, no, erase that. It can never be your pet.
But this is an unproductive attempt. Because you will never find one singular thing that caused you to stop being happy. It’s a cumulative effect of bunch of stuff coming together:
It’s called growing up.
Yes, the adulthood sucks. It comes with a lot of things you have not been prepared for.
In school, you have all these amazing friends you see everyday and you just play, learn and grow collectively. Everybody goes through the same things so you just share all the initial pain of growing up with your peers.
Then you slowly start to see how you are supposed to be responsible for your own life as you move on to university. Now you might have to cook for yourself or clean and nobody is pushing you to submit your papers. It’s fine, the spring break is coming. You’ll just eat some fries with your beer and submit that paper next semester. The university is not running away, but when are you going to be 18 again?
I am over 30 and sometimes I still feel this way. But I can’t afford to do it that extensively. The feeling slowly fades away as I have to face the realities of life.
Then comes the pressure to earn your life, pressure from your work, the pressure of adulthood loneliness. Because now you don’t have a school yard full of people who are going through the exact same things and would love to talk about it during the break, that you can skip the work together and talk about love, future and little pleasures of life.
While you are taking on a bunch of responsibilities though, adulthood is at the same time extremely shallow phase in your life. You can’t or don’t want to think about the big questions in life anymore because you have a wide-range of very practical questions you have to deal with.
Like for example: “are glass straws legit and should I buy some for my home?” or “would they just break as I am drinking my cold beverage?”. More importantly, “are they dishwasher safe”?.
Who cares about what Benedict Anderson had to say about the foundation of modern nation states?
Did he ever have to make a decision about the glass straws?
